Everybody Loves Disqus

My buddy Ray suggested I take a look at the Disqus comment system. After a little bit of tinkering, I think we have something respectable on the site. There is a little quirk with Facebook Connect and I currently have an open thread with the Disqus team to see how we can fix it.

But overall, it’s a great little comment system and it allows us to focus on other features instead of building one ourselves. Even more importantly, it allows us to continue to not require a user account for our site. We’ve updated the Privacy Policy to reflect our use of Disqus.

On one last note, we had one problem where too many Disqus forums would spawn because of our URL strategy on NewsTrendz; Disqus would create separate forums for  our “snapshot”, “news”, “twitter”, etc. views even if they were all the same article.

Apparently Disqus will use the window.location as the default forum identifier. It’s not intuitive in the documentation or by Google Searching on how to fix this but we finally found the solution. To have one forum for multiple pages, simply set the “disqus_url” in Javascript before you load their javascript file. The example is below:

<div id="disqus_thread"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
var disqus_url = "http://newstrendz.com<%= @selected_trend.build_trend_url %>";
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://disqus.com/forums/newstrendz/embed.js"></script>
<noscript><a href="http://newstrendz.disqus.com/?url=ref">View the discussion thread.</a></noscript>
<a href="http://disqus.com" class="dsq-brlink">blog comments powered by <span class="logo-disqus">Disqus</span></a>
<script type="text/javascript">
var disqus_url = "http://newstrendz.com<%= @selected_trend.build_trend_url %>";
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://disqus.com/forums/newstrendz/embed.js"></script><noscript><a href="http://newstrendz.disqus.com/?url=ref">View the discussion thread.</a></noscript><a href="http://disqus.com">blog comments powered by <span>Disqus</span></a>

So let us know how it works. Thanks Disqus and thanks Ray for the suggestion.

Advertisement